I discovered these about halfway through this fireplace season (so Probly Dec or so) and have had multiple fires since then. The cracks are mainly in the mortar between the bricks but there are some bricks with cracks too. The Mortar also seems brittle like its a bit too easy to remove to me.

Pretty sure this is considered a brick/mortar fire place not pre fab but still it seems a bit cheap in construction, again, to me personally.

The house is 22-23 years old and we will have lived here four years this July and not that it would have been but nothing about this was brought up during the purchase inspections.

I cleaned the crap out of the box, scrubbed the carbon off the cracks with a SS brush for better viewing and just replaced the log rack (or whatever the steel thing the burning logs sits on), not that it's pictured anyway!